All you need to know at this point is this: You should absolutely go see The Cabin in the Woods. Yes, it’s been hyped so much that you’re probably thinking, “Oh, there’s no way it’s THAT good.” Whether you end up thinking it is that good or not, to miss this film is to render yourself mute at watercooler conversations and happy hours for at least the next couple weeks. You’ll just have to stand there nodding your head and trying to pretend you know what you’re talking about every time someone says, “Oh my God, Cabin in the Woods, right?!” and you’ll say something stupid about the movie you didn’t go see, and everyone will stop talking and give you that look. You don’t want to be that guy.

This is the kind of film you could watch over and over again and still find something you missed on the previous viewings, but the first time, you really should see it knowing as little as possible. The bare bones, so to speak: We have our requisite five good-looking kids who vaguely remind you of the Scooby Gang (coin toss on which of them is Scooby): Our players are The Sporto (Chris Hemsworth), The Beauty/Slut (Anna Hutchison), The Stoner (Fran Kranz, who brilliantly manages to simultaneously evoke Shaggy and be way cooler than Shaggy), The Nice Girl/Kinda-Sorta-Almost Virgin (Kristen Connolly) and The Handsome, Nice and Brainy Guy (Jesse Williams). We have our beat-up RV standing in for the Mystery Machine, the Creepy Old Guy Who Warns Those Darn Kids to Stay Away from the Mysterious Cabin. And of course, we have the titular Cabin itself, which you have no doubt seen on the movie posters flying in the air and turning itself into some kind of puzzle box. That, my friends, is absolutely all you should know, except for this:(more…)

“It’s incredibly exciting to fabricate a world. I was like, ‘Man, why doesn’t every movie do this?’ You allow yourself the freedom to have every color of the palette make a statement. You allow yourself the freedom to paint buildings whatever color you want. You get to adjust or subvert the reality around you. And I say this as someone whose first films as a student were documentaries. With La La Land, I wanted to get at reality in an indirect way. It’s an emotional portrait of L.A., not a realistic one. And I wanted to push back against the strict reliance on realism, which is one reason why Hollywood doesn’t do musicals anymore. It wasn’t always this way. Just look at the movies of Douglas Sirk or Powell and Pressburger. They always went beyond ordinary realism to get to emotions. They were both mainstream and avant-garde. They were commercial at their core but also balls-out insane.”
~ Damien Chazelle On The Look Of La La Land

Fey: How are we going to proceed with any kind of dignity in an increasingly ugly world? And I actually was thinking — because I’ve got to write something for when I get the award — to use Sherry Lansing as an inspiration because she was a lady who worked in a very, very ugly business and always managed to be quite dignified. But in a world where the president makes fun of handicapped people and fat people, how do we proceed with dignity? I want to tell people, “If you do two things this year, watch Idiocracyby Mike Judge and read Leni Riefenstahl’s 800-page autobiography and then call it a year.”Letterman: Wait a minute. Tell me about Leni Riefenstahl.Fey: She grew up in Germany. She was in many ways a brilliant pioneer. She pioneered sports photography as we know it. She’s the one who had the idea to dig a trench next to the track for the Olympics and put a camera on a dolly. But she also rolled with the punches and said, “Well, he’s the führer. He’s my president. I’ll make films for him.” She did some terrible, terrible things. And I remember reading 20 years ago, thinking, “This is a real lesson, to be an artist who doesn’t roll with what your leader is doing just because he’s your leader.”Letterman: My impression of this woman is that she was the sister of Satan.Fey: She was in many ways. But what she claimed in the book was, “He was the president, so what was I supposed to do?” And I feel a lot of people are going to start rolling that way.
~ Tina Fey And David Letterman Are Anxious